ABOUT THE ESSAYS
You will be writing three essays in two hours, which gives you approximately 40 minutes for each
essay. In this 40 minutes you must read the text, understand it, formulate your thesis, and write a well-
developed and well-organized literary analysis essay.
Chapter 14 contains an analysis of essay prompts from released exams. The list describes the kinds of
questions that typically guide the AP Lit essays. There is always an essay on a poem (or a comparison of
two poems), a prose passage (fiction or nonfiction essay), and finally an open-ended question for which
you must supply the text.